First Semester DP Update

One topic where I feel as though I have shown the most growth would be working with percentages. Some examples of the work we did with percentages would be slopes involving rise/run when looking at hills as well as combining percentages with values such as combining a waiter's wages along with his tips when given the customer's bills for that time period.One activity that really helped me understand percentages was problem 4 in Exploration 5. In this problem I had to as I said earlier, find out how much money a waiter made in one night solely from tips when given his wages as well as the total amount of money he earned that night. For this problem I simply subtracted his wages from the customer's bills. After this I divided that amount by the percent of the tips he got that night.

Another problem in the exact same exploration, problem 1 in exploration 5, helped me learn more about working with percentages in a different light. In this problem, I had to find an elevation loss given a percentage over a distance. The problem read as follows, You see a sign that says “7% grade next 6 miles.” How much elevation are you about to lose? Given this information, I divided the percentage by the distance and I got an altitude loss of 2217.6 feet. I simply converted my answer in miles into feet, which was .66. This problem and this exploration in general I feel was one of the most well created throughout the semester.

By the time practice 13 had come along, I feel as though I had mastered percentage work by this point and for the first problem of this practice I feel as though I did very well. The problem was a question regarding growth in a population. I knew I was gaining at a rate of 1.54 percent per year so I simply plugged that into my knowledge of pbkt equations and using my knowledge of where to place the percent I was able to make my equation calculate the population at any given year if the growth rate stays the same.